Look at Me

by Jennifer Egan

  Throughout this speech, Thomas’s eyes never left Irene. Why, I wondered, when I was the subject, the one whose life was supposedly so extraordinary? But I couldn’t think of a way to object, or even to question him, without sounding petulant. Instead I said, “The Parthenon?”

  Thomas and Irene began speaking at once, then stopped. After a brief contest of demurrals, Irene explained to me that slight asymmetries in the Parthenon’s design actually gave it an illusion of perfection. “That’s what you meant, right?” she asked Thomas.

  “Yes!” he said, surprised and a little touched, I thought. “That’s exactly what I meant. Okay … so. Two.” Then he seemed to founder. “How to put this? An accident’s an accident, shit happens and all that. But, see, we don’t want shit happens, we want shit happens for a reason. It sounds terrible when you put it into words …”

  I had an inkling of what he was saying—it was the same thing Victoria had told me at lunch—and I was burning, for once, to be the person who knew something. “He’s saying her accident can’t happen by chance,” I told Irene. “Something in her life has to be the cause of it, so people can relate to her story and understand it.”

  “Yes!” Thomas hollered, whirling around and lunging to the place where I sat. “Yes. Yes. Yes.” He gazed at me, astounded. “Beautifully said, Charlotte!”

  “Thank you.” I flushed, already loathing myself for having pandered to Thomas, feeling as if I’d sold someone down the river in the process.

  “Again. I’m not saying make it up—I’m saying find the connections. Show us the buried logic. What I don’t want is, I was bringing cookies to Aunt Susie and I got run over by a tractor. This is not a Raymond Carver story, if you’re familiar with his work.”

  “It sounds more like Aeschylus,” Irene said tartly.

  Thomas mused a moment over this. I sensed that Irene impressed him, that he relished the abrasion of her skepticism. I was proud to have discovered her, brought her there.

  “Tragedy, okay. Yes,” he said. “But not Greek. Too cold. Has to be something warmer.”

  “Nineteenth century.”

  “Bingo. Hardy. The Brontës. Tolstoy. Sad things happen but they happen for a reason.”

  “Zola.”

  “Exactly. Stendhal. Or Dickens, for God’s sake.”

  “George Eliot,” Irene said. “Adam Bede.”

  “That’s the one where he—”

  “Gets her pregnant,” she said. “And then she tries to find him after his regiment is moved to Scotland.”

  “Oh, my God, where she’s hitching rides on carts and sleeping in the fields? That was the saddest book …,” Thomas said, his whole face opening at the memory. “But only the second half. The first half was kind of—”

  “That’s amazing!” Irene said, and she did look amazed. “I thought exactly the same thing.”

  “—schmaltzy.”

  I listened, my frustration at finding myself ignorant of these books offset by my wonder at the abrupt change in Irene; she was smiling, cheeks flushed. Books, I thought; she loved books. It made perfect sense.

  “Edith Wharton,” she said.

  “Yes! Wharton is perfect. Age of Innocence. House of Mirth. Or Flaubert,” he added, but then changed his mind. “Nah, Madam B.’s too dark, too modern.”

  “Too ironic,” Irene said.

  “Exactly, exactly. See, irony we don’t want—there’s too much of it out there! We just want the story without the built-in commentary.”

  “Ah, the universal point of view,” Irene said. “Would that we still believed in it.”

  I sat in silence. Several times I’d been on the verge of mentioning “The Eve of St. Agnes” or “The Rape of the Lock,” but I was afraid that Thomas and Irene would know these works better than I did (which was to say, know them even slightly), and I would be exposed.

  As Irene scribbled into her notebook, I saw Thomas eyeing her with the faintest tinge of appraisal, and only then did it strike me that he’d won. He’d coaxed Irene out of her sulk and into formation in a matter of—I glanced at my watch—thirty-eight minutes.

  “Okay,” Thomas said, taking a breath that seemed to portend still greater challenges ahead. Three.” Now he turned to me, aiming his attention so fully upon me that I felt my spine extend like a charmed snake. “Three, and this is kind of a new development, but like I said, things are moving fast and changing a little, Three, I’d like you to consider—you don’t have to decide yet—I’d like you to consider having a small video camera installed in your apartment.”

  “For security?”

  “Actually not. This would be to get some raw footage of you in your natural environment. See, people are already doing this on their individual Websites, so we basically have to give our subscribers that option. Now obviously MTV’s been doing it for years, but the fact of the matter is, Real World sucks and everyone knows it. Too fake. Too contrived! Too unlikely that these people would ever live together, much less be able to afford the kinds of apartments MTV sets them up in. But some raw footage from a real person’s life—an interesting person—that might be worth watching.”

  “But I mean,” I said, “I live alone. Most of the time all I’m doing is smoking cigarettes and looking out my window. Or sleeping.”

  “See, and you think that’s dull. But to the cannibal in New Guinea, eating human brains is pretty ho-hum, too. You’ve had this terrible accident, Charlotte! People are going to expect a sense of desolation, some anomie. That’s what makes it real!”

  “So you’d shoot some footage and kind of … edit it down to the essence?” said Irene, whose literary joie de vivre had been supplanted by a look of seasickness.

  “No, see, that’s another mistake Real World made. We’d do it as a raw feed. That’ll keep it from getting too constructed, too mediated. Whenever someone wants to see what you’re doing at that moment, they’ll click an icon—‘I Spy,’ I think we’re calling it—and there you’ll be. If you’re home.”

  “Pardon me for pointing out the obvious,” Irene said, a vibrato of incredulity, or something like it, fibrillating her voice, “but isn’t this all just a wee bit Orwellian?”

  Thomas’s jaw clenched, and a fleeting, nearly invisible current of anger jostled his features. “You know, I keep getting that from people? And I can’t for the life of me figure out why?” he said, almost joyfully. “This is the exact opposite of what Orwell was talking about: There, you had folks being spied on by a totalitarian government—they had no choice in the matter and no freedom. Whereas this is not only a hundred percent voluntary, obviously, but the whole thing is about freedom—freedom to communicate your experiences! Freedom to learn how other people live. If you ask me, it’s the ultimate expression of a democracy!” Despite his best efforts at joviality, blood had soaked his round, pleasant cheeks.

  I didn’t even have to look at Irene to know that Thomas had blown it. It didn’t matter what he said now; the camera had pushed her too far.

  “Suppose I decide no camera?” I said.

  “Not a problem,” Thomas said, with edgy nonchalance. “I mean obviously it’ll affect your purchase price, because I’ve got people—frankly I think it’s nuts—they’re willing to have the video feed straight from their bedrooms. So obviously they’ll get more because they’re giving more. Oh, and endorsements’ll hit the roof if people can actually watch you consuming products in your own home.”

  “I need to think about it,” I said, wanting him to feel just slightly redeemed, to restore some bonhomie to the room, now that (for once) it was within my power to do so. But even as I said it, I felt a part of me reconciling itself to the camera’s arrival, embracing it, awaiting it, preparing to foist its acceptance on the rest of me.

  “I’d like to see this product of yours,” Irene said, in a tone of fragile neutrality. I sensed her regret at having been won over so easily by the mention of a few books.

  “Absolutely. That was next on my list.” Thomas rose from his c
hair, anxiously scrutinizing our faces. Yet even now, with his pitch having clearly gone awry, his shadow self remained strangely recessed. Why? I wondered; what was protecting the fat, nervous boy from having to come out and face the jeering world? As Thomas ushered us into a shaded room adjacent to his office, a room containing a computer whose broad, iridescent screen appeared to hover in midair, I realized there could only be one answer: he didn’t need us.

  “None of the domestic stuff is signed and sealed yet, so legally I can’t show you that,” he said, seating himself at the keyboard with Irene and me on either side of him. “But the rules are looser for the International Ordinaries, and it’s not like these folks are going to know the difference.”

  He touched a few keys and the screen filled with the richly saturated image of a very black man standing by a yellow cow. Seeing him reminded me of Pluto. The man was draped in salmon-colored plaids that looked like tablecloths. He squinted in our direction, one hand extended to touch the velvety neck of the cow, whose horns twisted from its head like arms of a chandelier. The quality of the image was extraordinary; each yellow hair on the cow’s hide stood out in a kind of relief that suggested three dimensions. The man himself was beautiful, sharp slivers of muscle in his chest and torso flicking in the sunlight. He had one of those rich, symmetrical faces you could read anything into: love, humor, rage. His hair had been woven into long thin braids saturated with what looked like red clay. On his neck and arms were strands of multicolored beads. Irene and I both gaped at the image, whose urgent realism had the unlikely result of making it seem, finally, unreal—like a hologram.

  “He’s a Samburu warrior,” Thomas said. “I don’t know if we’ll end up using him—we may want to go more exotic. But he’s basically a mockup, just to show our investors how the international stuff’ll work.” He pressed another button and the image slid into motion, the man’s shy expression breaking open into a white crescent smile, the cow shifting restlessly, rousing dilatory flies that soon refastened themselves to its yellow neck. The man began speaking rapidly, incomprehensibly, and as he did, a bar of text scrolled along one side of the screen:

  Hi! My name is Kanja Joi [spelling???] and I’m a Samburu warrior living in the country of Kenya on the continent of Africa …

  “Translation needs some work,” Thomas mused.

  I carry this short sword in the event that I should chance to meet any lions while grazing my cows on the grassy plains of my country. Here, perhaps you would like to hear me sing …

  The text lagged behind the warrior himself, who had already burst into song: a series of guttural, atonal sounds gouged from someplace well below his diaphragm. The sounds, like the visuals, had a heightened precision that made me feel not merely in the warrior’s presence, but inside his throat.

  “Here, check this out,” Thomas said, moving the pointer to one of the warrior’s strands of beads and clicking there. Abruptly the warrior and his song evaporated, replaced by an image of a young girl arranging wires and dusty beads on a cloth. We heard her whispery voice, and the translation box scrolled,

  Hi, I’m Baka, Kanja’s niece. I learned the art of beaded jewelry from my maternal grandmother …

  “This will all be direct mail,” Thomas interjected. “You can order beads, wires, finished necklaces—whatever you want. Plus there’ll be a way to donate money to the family by credit card, which I personally think is going to be the future of charitable giving.” He turned to Irene. “People aren’t moved by abstract concepts anymore,” he said, with feeling. “They’re moved by people’s individual struggles. Save the Children—like, what children?”

  He was appealing to us, waving the flag of his altruism in hopes of winning us back, and I felt myself awaiting Irene’s reaction—Irene, who surely knew more about altruism than I did.

  Another double-click, and the original warrior was restored to the screen, still heaving up his strange noises with an eagerness that verged on desperation, as if he believed he were singing for his life.

  “Anyway, this is a crude mock-up,” Thomas said, stifling a yawn. A heaviness had engulfed us, the passivity of three people in a darkened room, looking at a screen. “The translation’s pretty bad, but you get the picture. Click on his hair, you hear about the hair. Click on his forehead, you get the thought categories: Dreams, Wishes, all that stuff. Want to guess the number one Hope/Aspiration of every single International Ordinary, bar none? Live in America. Even the ones whose governments hate us! And the beautiful thing is, a guy like this might actually get to do it—not the usual way, jammed in a tenement in Queens hawking fake Rolexes outside Tiffany’s, but with the real potential to make it! Casting agents, model agencies, record producers—they’re all going to be scouring our Internationals for raw material. You ask me, this guy could wind up a pop star, easy. I mean, it’s hard to tell if he can actually sing, but it may not even matter. He could rap, for Godsakes.”

  “I just wonder,” Irene said, and then stopped. “I wonder if someone might not just visit Kenya instead.”

  “Now, absolutely,” Thomas said. “But ask yourself: how long is that going to last? I think the golden age of tourism is basically over, especially for Americans. The coral’s dead or dying, you’ve got weird grass choking out the Med, you’ve got e-coli and flesh-eating diseases all over the place, you’ve got terrorists mowing people down in the Temple of Luxor … I mean, at a certain point, how much are you willing to risk for a two-week vacation? So we’re thinking ahead.”

  As we filed back into Thomas’s office, I watched Irene, trying to gauge her reaction. She seemed dazed, subdued.

  “I have a question, too,” I said, feeling oddly nervous as they both waited for me to speak. “I know a homeless man, and I was wondering if you might want someone like that in Ordinary People.”

  “You know a homeless man?” Thomas asked, glancing at Irene in surprise. She mimed her ignorance.

  “I met him near the East River by my apartment. He’s a pretty interesting guy.” I knew better than to say unusual; he had to be representative of his type.

  “Homeless. Homeless,” Thomas mused, going to his window and looking outside. “We’ve talked about having a homeless Ordinary. But see, a lot of homeless people are crazy, and we already have a manic depressive and two schizophrenics.”

  “Oh, no,” I said. “He’s not crazy at all.”

  “How do you know he’s homeless?”

  “He lives in a tent, he goes through garbage cans, he begs. He’s definitely homeless.”

  “What about substance abuse?” Thomas said. “Because again, we have two addicts—heroin and crack—plus an alcoholic.”

  “He drinks a little,” I said, playing it down. “Nothing major.”

  “Huh,” Thomas said. “Well, there are two ways we could go with something like this. The easiest is to introduce him as part of your daily life and see if people take to him. If they do, we consider setting him up on his own as a kind of spinoff.”

  “I’m not sure I see a homeless man being part of Charlotte’s daily life,” Irene told Thomas.

  “Oh, but he already is,” I said, thinking she’d misunderstood. “I mean, not a huge part. A small part.”

  “No, but Irene has a point, though,” Thomas said. “It may be kind of a stretch.”

  I crossed my arms, stilled by a revelation that had been mounting in me ever since our arrival in this bower of poured concrete: that as the “subject,” I was both the center of attention and completely extraneous. The feeling brought with it an eerie, stultifying familiarity; I was still the model, after all. I was modeling my life.

  “He asked me to give you this,” I told Thomas, and dug Pluto’s homemade business card out of my purse.

  Thomas frowned. “The guy has an E-mail address?”

  “He uses the computers at Kinko’s when he can afford it. He’s trying to improve his life.”

  “God, I love that,” Thomas said, his voice full of tenderness. “It’s so m
oving. This poor guy. Is he relatively clean?”

  “Immaculate.”

  “Well, I’ll send him an E-mail,” Thomas said. “We’ll see what happens.”

  Irene and I gathered our things and Thomas walked us to the elevators. As we waited among the poured-concrete walls (blotched aquamarine, like undersea stone), a silence opened among us and spread. Irene fingered the worn strap of her shoulder bag and stared at the elevator doors.

  “Look. I know you have doubts,” Thomas finally said. “Even I wonder about this project sometimes—will it really improve people’s lives, or am I just kidding myself? Couple of weeks ago I approached a guy—heart surgeon, actually—about becoming an Extraordinary, and he tells me, exact words, ‘You’re turning people into shopping malls.’ I hardly slept the whole night, thinking about that. But finally I decided, you know what? If that’s where it’s going then I want to be there, making sure it’s done responsibly. I invented this product, sure, but I’m not so unique—I’m part of a Zeitgeist. If I don’t do it, someone else will. And maybe there’s a positive to it, you know? Maybe the more interested we get in learning about each other, the less reason we’ll have to do things like fight wars—we’ll all be on the same side. So the next morning I come in here, no sleep from obsessing about this thing, and guess what? There’s already a message from the guy. The surgeon. He wants in.”

  The elevator came and I turned, intending to board, but Irene was listening to Thomas. The door slid shut. “See, it’s the future,” he went on, with a kind of apology. “It’s going to happen with or without you. But if you go with this thing, if you give yourself to it, you’ll own that future; you’ll be right in the heart of it. If you resist, that’s when it rolls over you, and whatever you have now, you’ll have less.”

  He was speaking to Irene, and she listened with a look of panic. Thomas pled his case with a rueful energy quite apart from his usual zeal, as if he suspected that this future would elude us despite his best efforts. We weren’t up to it. And for the first time that day, I glimpsed his shadow self—the awkward, overlarge boy I’d befriended two months before, peeping from the recesses of Thomas Keene. Not in fear, as I had expected (even hoped), but in empathy. For us. The big, softhearted boy had been summoned from the shadows by worry. And for all my queasiness about the future Thomas and his poured-concrete office embodied, worse was the thought of having no place in it—of being left behind.